Links For February

[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]

1: The newest studies don’t find evidence that extracurriculars like chess, second languages, playing an instrument, etc can improve in-school learning.

2: Did you know: Spanish people consider it good luck to eat twelve grapes at midnight on New Years, one at each chime of the clock tower in Madrid. This has caused enough choking deaths that doctors started a petition to make the clock tower chime more slowly.

3: At long last, scientists have discovered a millipede that really does have (more than) a thousand legs, Eumillipes persephone, which lives tens of meters underground in Australia and in your nightmares. Recent progress in this area inspired me to Fermi-estimate a millipede version of Moore’s Law, which suggests we should be up to megapedes by 2140 and gigapedes by 2300.